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proud but not very practical. The porter had gone and I do not know how we should have managed with Mother and the Littles, but at that moment the dogs stood up, wagging their tails
more violently and looking towards a white door on the entresol landing. It opened and Mademoiselle Zizi and Eliot came out.
    It was the first time we had seen anyone in ‘tails’. Uncle William had a dinner-jacket, of course, but our vision had gone no further than that. I say ‘tails’ because it
was at Eliot we looked. It seems strange now that, seeing a man and a woman both in full evening dress, we looked at the man first, but there was no question about it. Hester gave a little
gasp.
    “Were you ever a sailor?” Joss asked Eliot afterwards. I knew what she meant; he was tall and brown and lean, as were sailors in magazine pictures. His eyes even had lines at the
sides as if he had wrinkled them looking at the sun. “Were you a sailor?”
    “Probably,” said Eliot.
    “Don’t you know?” asked Hester incredulous.
    “I know I was a soldier,” said Eliot. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman . . .” but Hester interrupted him.
    “You can’t have been everything,” she said.
    “I pretty well was,” said Eliot.
    We took it for granted that his eyes were blue. His hair was brown, a little grizzled. His face had curious high cheekbones. “From my Chinese grandmother,” he told us solemnly. We
believed him, and it still seems to me now that his hands and feet were so small as to be oriental. “I am descended from Genghis Khan,” he was to tell us, and Hester asked, “Who
was Genghis Khan?”
    “A fearful Tartar,” said Eliot, smoothing her hair.
    His clothes were so impeccable—that was a word I liked and had taught to Willmouse—that they looked as if he had just bought them.
    “Well, he had.” Hester said that later. “Poor Eliot. He could never keep his clothes long.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He said so. He said, ‘Pity, I like this coat. I hate to leave it.’ That was his checked one; of course, he was thinking aloud. He did not know I was there. Toinette is always
saying that his shirts and pyjamas are new.”
    That night he wore medals. “His?” Uncle Willaim always said he doubted it but “Of course they were his,” we said indignantly.
    He had a carnation in his buttonhole, a dark-red one, and it seemed to symbolise Eliot for us. Why are flowers bought by men so much more notable than those bought by women? I do not know, but
they are. Father brought flowers into the house but they were dried, pressed brown, the life gone out of them; with Eliot the flower was alive.
    Behind him came Mademoiselle Zizi. When we looked at her we were struck dumb with shyness because Mademoiselle Zizi was . . . “Bare,” whispered Hester. Arms, neck and shoulders,
“and back and front,” said Hester reluctantly. We did not know what little puritans we were until we saw Mademoiselle Zizi.
    Privately I thought her very beautiful, with her heavy dark-red hair and eyes that seemed almost too enormous—like a sunflower’s. They were blued . . . “on the lids ,” said Hester, surprised, and her mouth was very, very red. What there was of her dress was gauze, black.
    I saw Willmouse looking at the dress critically at first, then satisfied. “That is a real dress,” whispered Willmouse, “and what a smell!”
    “Is the smell the lady?” asked Vicky. It had filled the hall as Mademoiselle Zizi came in.
    They came down the steps from the landing, stopped at the sight of us, and it was then that Eliot said, “Good God! An orphanage!”
    Joss was too angry to notice that he spoke in English.
    “Don’t worry,” she said bitingly, “we are not staying.” To us she said sharply, “Come on. We will take the luggage first and come back for Mother.”
    She walked past Eliot to the door, her painting things under her arm; she had picked up two suitcases; Vicky, carrying Nebuchadnezzar’s